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User blog:Kattusite/Category Restructuring
As per the guidelines set out in and the associated Wikipedia help pages, I'm going to begin revising and restructuring many of the categories on the wiki. Primarily, this restructuring won't affect any of the content of any categories, only the organization of the already existing categories. Some of the things I outline might but a little ambitious, but hey--I can dream. Don't mind if I start to ramble in some parts... A good deal of this is me thinking out loud. Hierarchy Revisions The major thing I am looking to change is that we don't really seem to have any coherent category hierarchy. That is, every page is listed under every possible category that describes it, rather than having only the most specific category. For example, Category:PAYDAY 2 currently contains most, if not all, of the pages relating to Payday 2. It would be much simpler to follow if Category:PAYDAY 2 contained only a handful of actual pages (only PAYDAY 2 really comes to mind at the moment), and instead contained a series of subcategories, such as Category:Gameplay (Payday 2), Category:PAYDAY 2 heists, Category:Payday 2 Images, Category:Skills, and so on. This way, we would not have a top-level category (Category:PAYDAY 2) that contained every page on the wiki, but rather an organized group of subcategories that contained only the most relevant pages. For reference, Category:Skills and Category:Weapons are organized fairly well. Edit: Naming Conventions Some Category pages should be blanked and recreated so that they follow some semblance of a convention. For instance, Category:Melee specifically contains only melee weapons in payday 2. Surely it can't hurt to change this category to be named Category:Melee weapons (Payday 2). In general, it seems the majority of the already existing category pages follow a naming convention similar to Category:Secondary weapons (Payday 2). The first word of the category name is capitalized, and all subsequent words are not capitalized, excluding, of course, proper nouns. To specify a particular game, the name of the game should be included in parentheses following the title. The game should probably be written either according to the rules of standard English (e.g., "Payday 2") or in all caps (e.q., "PAYDAY 2"). The capitalization style for the game should be uniform across all categories, but I don't think it really matters which is chosen. (Personally, I prefer not to use all caps, as "PAYDAY 2" just looks like such an eyesore in standard text.) Additionally, the game title for each game should be consistent. The first game in the Payday series, should, for convenience, be referred to in Category page titles either as Payday 1 or as Payday: The Heist (or some alternate version of the title, such as PD:TH), but it should only ever appear in a single form. Category pages featuring content from exclusively one game should always include that game's title in the category name for clarity. How would someone be able to differentiate between Category:DLC (now defunct) and Category:DLC (Payday 2) otherwise? Category:DLC, under this convention, would represent DLC from any game in the Payday series. Looking quickly through the categories, I couldn't find a category for DLC from PD:TH, but if one exists, Category:DLC (Payday 1) might be a suitably specific title. Categories whose names could be improved (WIP To-do list): *Category:PAYDAY 2 heists ex. to Category:Heists (Payday 2) *Category:PAYDAY 1 heists ex. to Category:Heists (Payday 1) *Category:Payday 2 Images ex. to Category:Images (Payday 2) *Category:Skills and sub cats might be ambiguous (change to Skills (Payday 2)?) *Possible creation of a Category:Story (Payday 2) something similar if there is enough canon content. (Companies would be a nice candidate for this category) Heist Categories One thing I noticed while looking through the category list is that most heists have their own category pages (e.g., Category:Rats or Category:Four Stores (now defunct)). Many of these category pages were recursive (they contained themselves as child categories, an oversight I have already fixed. I'm not completely sure why these category pages exist, but they might serve some function at some point. Because the only page that logically belongs to each of these categories is the eponymous page, the categories serve little to no purpose organizationally. This leads to a dilemma. According to the manual of style, pages should (generally) not belong to both a category and that category's child. Therefore, if the imaginary category Category:HesitName is a child category of Category:Payday 2 heists, as is only logical, the imaginary page "HeistName" should not be a member of both Category:HeistName and Category:Payday 2 heists. As the more specific of the two, Category:HeistName takes precedence. A failure to include HeistName within Category:HeistName would likely leave Category:HeistName empty, so this course of action is ill-advised. However, if Category:HeistName does contain HeistName, it would seem to be against the wiki manual of style to have Category:Payday 2 heists contain HeistName as well. Of the two categories in question, it is Category:Payday 2 heists that serves the most useful function, so it would be problematic to carry out this course of action. Proposed Solutions * Remove Category:HeistName. As far as I can see, it serves no real purpose other than to contain HeistName. There are very few circumstances in which Category:HeistName will be able to group together similar pages, because there are very few pieces of information related to a particular heist that are significant enough to warrant their own page, rather than a mention in a Trivia section. This seems to be a good solution, but it will be bothersome to change everything back to the current format should the Category:HeistName become useful at some point in time. * Allow heist pages to be members of both a category and its direct subcategory. Though this is frowned upon by the wiki's manual of style, the (much lengthier) Wikipedia article on category style does permit exceptions to this rule in some cases. This solution is easy. Everything pretty much stays the same. I'm going with this for now because it doesn't require much effort to implement or undo. Eponymous Categories Eponymous categories are categories that share their category name with a page name (almost every heist or specific DLC page/category falls under this description). For browsing and organizational convenience, it seems logical that these categories should be allowed to disobey the "no page in both a parent and child category" rule. For example, Big Bank (DLC) logically falls under DLC (Payday 2). As one of Payday 2's DLCs, it seems that Big Bank (DLC) should rightfully belong to this category. More specifically, the page could also be classified under Category:Big Bank DLC. According the manual of style, this classification should be mutually exclusive of a classification under DLC (Payday 2), as membership in Category:Big Bank DLC logically implies membership in Category:DLC (Payday 2). However, for the layman browsing the Big Bank (DLC) page, both categories may be of immediate interest, as one relates to the page in its capacity as DLC, and the other relates to it with regard to the content packaged within that DLC (as a title page, in a manner of speaking). For this reason, I will not be enforcing the manual of style rules as strictly on pages with eponymous categories for the time being. Category:Blog posts